A cross-cultural adaptation in reporting perinatal safety events

Abstract

Incident reporting enables clinicians to examine historical patient safety events and to target different levels of analysis toward actionable knowledge. The cross-cultural adaptation of reporting instruments promotes the international communication on medical errors and patient safety culture. This study initializes a translation and adaptation of the Common Formats (in US) to Chinese and a localized reporting on perinatal incidents in a Chinese hospital. The results demonstrate the validity of the cross-cultural translation and diversity in a typical perinatal incident reported by Chinese clinicians. These findings suggest (1) a comprehensive data report format is critical in the incident reporting; (2) an imperative need of cross-cultural study on incident reporting; (3) future direction of incident reporting and patient safety culture.